Upcoming genealogical events of Wisconsin/Illinois regional interest

British Interest Group of Wisconsin and Illinois

Upcoming events of regional interest (in Wisconsin, Illinois & nearby portions of neighboring states):

If you need to have larger text for ease of reading, nearly all web browsers have a feature to increase (or decrease) the size of the text. This control is usually located somewhere in the View menu of the browser, with a sub-menu name such as “Zoom” or “Text size.”

Be sure also to check the listing of upcoming BIGWILL meetings! You may also want to check out the various cultural events (Highland Games, Irish Fests, etc.) listed on the Upcoming events of British Isles interest web page.

11 July 2015 - 2015 Summer Conference
Sponsored by the McHenry County (Illinois) Genealogical Society. Four program sessions, each with three or four concurrent lectures. Speakers will include Debbie Parker Wayne, Thomas MacEntee, Greg Phelps, Jane Haldeman, Craig Pfannkuche, Ray Johnson, and Maureen Brady. See the conference brochure for more details.
McHenry County College, 8900 U.S. Highway 14, Crystal Lake, Illinois. .

25-27 September 2015 - 23^rd Annual Cornish Festival

8 July 2015
Sponsored by The Southwest Wisconsin Cornish Society. Mineral Point, Wisconsin. See details on the Upcoming events of British Isles interest page.

26-29 April 2017 - “Ohio Genealogical Society Conference”

23 June 2016
Annual Conference of the Ohio Genealogical Society.
Sandusky, Ohio. Periodically visit the conference web page for further information as the plans develop for this conference.

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How does this list get assembled? Well, it’s partly automated, but mostly manual. The automated part is that I have tools in place which alert me whenever a web page which contains a particular society’s calendar of events has changed. Not every society’s calendar of events, mind you – just the ones which I have already found. (An exception is any calendar web page containing extraneous material which changes daily – I have found it impractical to monitor such web pages.) I also monitor several other event calendars, such as the one maintained by FGS, for new listings. A few societies whose web sites aren’t always kept up-to-date regularly send me press releases by email. There are two manual parts. One is obvious – the actual listings in this listed are “hand edited” by me, mostly to achieve greater consistency, but also to put as much information about the talks as I can into a relatively small number of words. The other is perhaps less obvious – the selection of what meetings actually get added to the list. My “rules” aren’t hard and fast, but I follow them pretty closely. I’d like to see:

The event is sponsored by a non-profit society
The event includes a lecture and has a title which describes the lecture topic
The topic is relevant to the study of family history
There is contact information usable for getting more information than I can include here, preferably via the internet (i.e., a web site or an email address)
The name of the speaker(s), the location and the starting time are clearly identified

Nearly any genealogical event in Wisconsin or Illinois which meets these criteria is included, subject to the availability of my time to do the work (this is a volunteer project). For events outside of these two states, I get a lot pickier, especially as to what I perceive as the broad appeal of the topic. For events which I expect to have a large draw, I sometimes put in a temporary entry which gives little more than the date, the city where the event will take place and the name of the sponsor.
So what can a society do to get its meetings listed here? Let me know how I can easily keep track of them! If the problem is simply that I didn’t find the time to include some particular meeting, I’ll fess up to that (privately) – it certainly happens from time to time. And, oh yes – if you see a mistake in a listing, please let me know.

What’s the problem with “frames technology”? Frames technology is a web page coding technology which dedicates different parts (“frames”) of the browser window for different purposes, such as a header, a list of menu choices, a display of data, etc.There are several reasons why this coding technology is not ideal, but the one which bothers this webmaster the most has to do with printing. In many situations, only one frame is printed when the viewer asks for a printout of the web page – invariably NOT the one the viewer is most interested in. If viewing a website which uses frames technology, make sure the cursor is active in the area (i.e., having been clicked while located in the area) you are most interested in when you ask for a printout.

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This page was last modified on 23 June 2016